It;'s that time of year again when we lose the annual Artvoice Best of Buffalo Award ;(



Maybe this year we could win if everyone voted estrip.org for BEST LOCAL WEBSITE instead of half of the people voting for best local web site and the other half voting for best local blog. Estrip.org is not a blog, it is a blogging website. As I said last year, if you vote, vote best local website for the site and vote a specific user's blog for best local blog.



Both are in the "People you Know Category" In order for your vote to count you need to vote for 30 Best of Buffalo Topics. Voting is much easier this year. I like the new look of the voting interface ;)

To sign up go to and sign up to vote. Get all your friends to vote too.

I did some bug fixing and updates today. It sucks so bad right now on my slow computer. I am ready for a new faster one with more RAM.

I am sure something is fucked up, if it is -go ahead and leave a comment here.

On linux the file upload now defaults to the old style one so that it does not crash.

Fixed the character counter in the create message window.

Changed the mobile/dialup image link in the top left to say estrip::lite - it is a more appropriate name.

Changed the logout button to be an exit sign.

Made it so that the surebert sticker loads sooner, which in turn allows the "restore backup" button to load faster, if you ever lose a journal.

Well we made it. 5,000,000 views since Dec 24th, 2004. The kind of thing we should have done a press release about but i am too busy nowadays.

Thanks everyone for your contribution to this by writing the nearly 4,000,000 word you have written in your journals.
--paul

The non-mobile version of the site should work normal in Linux Konqueror now. I switched it to use the old upload system for konqueror.

There is still no sound in Konqueror but other than that it is normal.

What are we going to do for 5 millions views since Dec 24, 2003. It is going to happen very soon. Right now we are at 4,966,965 views right now. We are also just short of 4 million words.

paul

I fixed the IE error that would not let you open up a new comment. It appears that IE reports an image as having a href property. That is lame. I was using it like if the thing you clicked doesn't have an href use its parents href. But because the image was falsely reporting having an href property it was opening the image instead of the comment box. All the other browsers handled it properly. Instead of asking if it had an href property I asked if it did not have an src property.

Chris,
We do not advertise on estrip. It is one of our main objectives to maintain a commercial free public space as we have done for four years. Your site has advertisements on it in the form of google ads.

From a web design/programming perspective, your site is not unique enough to warrant talking about it. It is basically yet another vBulletin with google ads clone.

Sorry,
Paul Visco

I can't believe the site has been around for four years. When I first thought of it after reading about The Well in Howard Rheingolds book virtual Communities (The whole book is online) , I thought - I could never make anything so cool. It is crazy that the well started in 1995. When listening to the book, yes I had the computer read it to me in that computer voice I so love, I envisioned it being so far away in the past. Of course it could not have been considering the visual internet really started around 1995. Well I was wrong. There are some great chapters about the minitel experince in france. I would suggest anyone who gets a chance , checks out the book.

So the real point of this journal is google analytics. I use my own software to calculate the actual users usage of certain features but I pretty much stopped logging web data a couple months ago other than journal views and browser types as so much of it became spam.

I am trying to track the stats for the site using Google Analytics and really enjoy the graphs it makes. Best of all it is free. We have such a strange pattern of users. I am totally amazed that almost everyone has Flash player 8 or 9. It was never liek that before. I think that youtube made this change happen. Just about everyone seems to go to youtube and youtube requires flash player 8 or greater. After one month I will post more of the data but it is hard to see the trends yet. Who the fuck uses netscape nowadays?

1. Firefox 49.46%
2. Internet Explorer 38.54%
3. Safari 7.28%
4. Mozilla 4.04%
5. Netscape 0.27%
6. Opera 0.27%
7. Konqueror 0.13%



I was also amazed that 99.3% of visitors have a java runtime engine installed. I am going to start using java I think for some applet stuff. I was concerned that people would not have the JRE but I guess I was wrong.

So far it looks like most people get here by just going right to the address itself. The rest seem to come from google. This is no surprise as their are no lnks to the site form anyone accept for foreverelmwood.com and a very few others.


Here is a map of the location of the people visiting estrip.org. I know who most of the dots in other cities are and of course a couple of the people are random googlers that found it. Today we had some visitor from Compton, CA and Sao Paul Brazil. It is so weird to see people from other places come here. What do they think of it?

I fixed it so the inline external links e.g. work again by automatically opening in a new window, instead of you having to right click and open in new window. Hope that helps.

I also finally got my new opensuse 10.2 linux development system up and running. I managed to get both zend and maya plus the xgl desktop effects library called beryl running. Now I am happy and you can expect more development from me.
--Paul

Fixed the message window and mail window problem where they were not opening up in new windows.